Web Robots (Crawlers, Web Wanderers or Spiders) are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Among many uses, search engines use them to index the web content.

Web Robots (Crawlers, Web Wanderers or Spiders) are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Among many uses, search engines use them to index the web content.

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Robots.txt implements the REP (Robots Exclusion Protocol), which allows the web site administrator to define what parts of the site are off-limits to specific robot user agent names. Web administrators can Allow access to their web content and Disallow access to cgi, private and temporary directories, for example, if they do not want pages in those areas indexed.

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Robots.txt implements the REP ([[wp:Robots exclusion standard|Robots Exclusion Protocol]]), which allows the web site administrator to define what parts of the site are off-limits to specific robot user agent names. Web administrators can Allow access to their web content and Disallow access to cgi, private and temporary directories, for example, if they do not want pages in those areas indexed.

==Where to place my robots.txt file?==

==Where to place my robots.txt file?==

A standard robots.txt its included in your joomla root.

A standard robots.txt its included in your joomla root.

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The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain and must be named "robots.txt".

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The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain or subdomain and must be named <code>robots.txt</code>.

===Joomla in a subdirectory===

===Joomla in a subdirectory===

Line 14:

Line 14:

==Joomla robots.txt contents==

==Joomla robots.txt contents==

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This is the contents of a standard Joomla robots.txt

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This is the contents of a [https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/master/robots.txt standard Joomla robots.txt]:

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<source lang="php">

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<source lang="text">

User-agent: *

User-agent: *

Disallow: /administrator/

Disallow: /administrator/

Line 35:

Line 35:

</source>

</source>

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==Robot Exclusion==

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==Robot exclusion==

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You can exclude directories or block robots from your site adding Disallow rule to the robots.txt

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You can exclude directories or block robots from your site adding Disallow rule to robots.txt. E.g. to prevent any robots from visiting the <code>/tmp</code> directory, add the following rule:

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Infos:

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<source lang="text">

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* [http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html A Standard for Robot Exclusion]

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Disallow: /tmp/

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</source>

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See also:

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* [http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html A Standard for Robot Exclusion] — specification of the robots.txt standard

* [http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=156449 Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file]

* [http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=156449 Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file]

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Web Robots (Crawlers, Web Wanderers or Spiders) are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Among many uses, search engines use them to index the web content. Robots.txt implements the REP (Robots Exclusion Protocol), which allows the web site administrator to define what parts of the site are off-limits to specific robot user agent names. Web administrators can Allow access to their web content and Disallow access to cgi, private and temporary directories, for example, if they do not want pages in those areas indexed.

Where to place my robots.txt file?

A standard robots.txt its included in your joomla root. The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain or subdomain and must be named robots.txt.

Joomla in a subdirectory

A robots.txt file located in a subdirectory isn't valid, as bots only check for this file in the root of the domain. If the Joomla site is installed within a folder such as at e.g. example.com/joomla/ the robots.txt file MUST be moved to the site root at e.g. example.com/robots.txt. Note: The joomla folder name MUST be prefixed to the disallowed path, e.g. the Disallow rule for the /administrator/ folder MUST be changed to read Disallow: /joomla/administrator/